Splice Studio lets developers create composite web services, in other words create larger, multitasking web services out of many small, single-purpose web services. (Composite web services are different from composite applications in that composite applications have a user interface and can be used by an end user. A composite web service is still a web service lacking a presentation layer, but an advanced one capable of pulling information from many different sources. It’s used to build an application, perhaps a composite application.)

Xignite provides 50 standard Web services to its clients, some of whom are Wall Street firms ABN Amro, Legg Mason and ING (one of these is testing Splice Studio internally). Such large clients often ask Xignite to customize its web services, says Stephane Dubois, CEO of Xignite. For example, a customer might want to pull several Xignite web services – say, services that obtain data for a calendar, earnings announcements, earnings estimates, and aftermarket news -- together into one combined service that could then be used by several website pages. Initially Xignite started writing custom, “wrapper” web services that could tie such services together. Then they developed Splice to let customers do this for themselves, mashing together Xignite’s prefab web services and their own internal web services. The ability to link web services together into larger application building blocks that reflect a firm’s common business processes should reduce developers’ workload. In theory, even business users could create their composite applications by consuming these compound web services.

One might think that binding web services together would defeat the purpose of having a services-oriented architecture, which is largely the ability to reuse independent chunks of code. But Dubois says the coagulated web services generated in Splice are simply bigger chunks of functionality that are still separate from the presentation layer and still behave like web services.

So far, Splice Studio works strictly with Xignite’s web services. Web services from other sources can be added if they have a SOAP API, Dubois says, but Xignite will be selective about which other vendors' web services are allowed on the platform. “Our strategy is to not necessarily open it all up to the rest of the world immediately, because we want to make sure customers can build mission-critical applications on our platform,” as opposed to a more consumer-oriented mashup site like Yahoo Pipes. “We’re going to partner with vendors who have solid services that can deliver 99.99% reliability, so that people who build applications on our platform can rely on those services,” he says. If a client wants to mashup internally-built web services, Xignite can add them to the platform, but Dubois is aware that firms may not want to integrate highly confidential information, such as client portfolio data, with the open platform.